Teaching Freshman English?

Question

i'm doing a career report on our future careers and i want to be a 9th grade language arts teacher. i'm interested in this for myself and for my research paper. can anyone who is a teacher or is going to school to be a teacher tell me how much schooling is needed? how long does it take to actually be a teacher after all of the student teaching? what is an approxoment annual salary? is teaching freshman THAT hard? with all of the lesson plans and all? is it hard to grade 100's of papers? thanks for help...also is there anything i should know about it? (I am in the United states)

Answer 1

I suggest you interview one of the English teachers at your school. Requirements vary from state to state.

Typically you can expect to go to college for 4 years. This includes student teaching. Your first year of teaching requires you to be observed and at that point you learn whether or not you actually pass. Soon after graduating you will need to pursue a masters degree. This is a 2 year degree but will take you longer if you are teaching and going to school.

Salary depends on where you are but you can expect to be around 25,000-35,000.

Teaching freshman is not that hard. There are challenges but you learn how to handle them while you study. Grading papers can sometimes be tiring and English teachers may have a few weeks with little to grade and the HOURS of grading because of the lengthy papers that you have to assign. All in all I do not think that it is that bad.

Answer 2

I teach LA to students in grades seven, eight and nine. Although I'm in Canada, my experiences are probably similar to those of American teachers.

I first got a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree in English from a university. After that, I did a two-year Bachelor of Education degree, specializing in Secondary Language Arts. That comes out to six years of university. As part of my program I did a 75-hour internship at an environmental education non-profit organization, 175 hours of student-teaching in a junior high and 350 hours of student teaching in a senior high. All students at my university are required to do an internship in an area related to education but not their specialization, plus the two structured student-teaching experiences (they randomly select who does more time in a junior high and who does more in a senior high). When I graduated from the program in April, I was eligible to begin substitute teaching the next day, and I was eligible for full-time, regular teaching jobs starting the following September. In my area there is a high demand for teachers, so it's easy to get hired once you're qualified. By the way, to get qualified I had to send a whole bunch of documents to the teacher's association and the government during my last few months of school. In Canada, you don't need to write any subject area tests because you have to have a prior degree in the area you want to teach.

The starting salary for teachers in my area is $51,500 annually. When I was a student I lived in the same city with only about $12,000 per year to spend, so I am able to live very well and save a lot on my current salary.

Teaching freshmen isn't any harder than teaching other students (although in my area the ninth grade students go to school with the sevens and eights). What's more important than daily lesson plans is long-term unit plans, where you determine the goals that students will meet by the end of the unit. Once you've established the long-term goals, it's easier to make rough daily plans because you know where you're headed. You can never approach one lesson in isolation- you need to consider it in relation to what the students have already done, what they will do, and the "Enduring Understandings" you want them to have long after the course is over.

There is a huge movement in teaching right now towards Assessment FOR Learning, rather than Assessment OF Learning. When you assess for learning, you don't give every little assignment a grade. Instead, you look at small assignments as opportunities for students to develop their skills in a safe, risk-free way. Instead of giving them a mark, teachers can use rubrics to show which areas of the work are strong and weak. Teachers can keep track of the students' growth, and when the students have mastered the concept it's safe to start marking the final product. If you become a teacher who gives (and records!) marks for little things like binder organization and title pages then a) you're wasting time and b) you're probably not following the curriculum guide. Assessment for learning results in less marking for the teacher, but a final grade that more accurately represents student knowledge. After all, if everything is for marks, when do students have the chance to TRY?